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Mike Gunderloy's "Rails Rescue Handbook" – Very Handy!

The Rails Rescue Handbook is a new, 83 page PDF e-book by Mike Gunderloy that goes in-depth on how to "rescue" a Rails project that might have, well, gone off the rails. The book is aimed at people who've had to (or want to) take over development on other people's projects and Rails newbies who want to learn conventions. The book costs $9.99 (or £7.08 if you're in the UK) and comes as a DRM-free PDF (a short sample chapter is available).

The book is split into many sections, such as Setting Expectations, Source Code Management, Dissecting the MVC, Judging the Tests, Investigating Deployment, metric_fu to the Rescue, Reading Exceptions, Database Rescues, Log File Analysis, Testing Rescues, Refactoring Rescues, Modernizing Code, Taming Plugins, Tackling View Performance Issues, and, naturally, many more. It's a pretty broad and shallow look at a rather murky area few people have bothered to write about before, so the only complaint you could have about this book is that it's too short - but given the niche, anything is great!

Mike was a Rails contributor for a while as well as a founding member of official Rails Activists team. He still blogs cool Rails links at A Fresh Cup and works as part of the Rails Documentation team. Put it this way, if anyone's writing could be trusted about Rails, there aren't many people more credible than Mike.

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Mike packed a lot into this book. I've been working with Rails since pre-1.0 and I still found a bunch of practical information I can use on new and old projects. Like you said, this book is great for the Rails newbies to see what kinds of problems applications can get over time.

The section on "Refactoring the Client Relationship" is great for any consultant brought into a rescue project (or any project with existing code). I knew the principles behind it but never had it refactored to the three options described.

(Full disclosure: I had a prerelease version of this book to review. But that just means I got to read it twice before I bought my own copy.)